


Around the Campfire

by Nottherealdean



Series: Dean!clones [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Cauterization, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Self-cest, dean!clones, puppet!deans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:20:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1702910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nottherealdean/pseuds/Nottherealdean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the Dean!clones is alone in Purgatory, and is injured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Around the Campfire

**Author's Note:**

> Posted on tumblr on Mar. 9, 2014.

Dean was okay. He was. Or he would be, in a day or two. Once he had a little time to heal. It would stop bleeding, and yeah, he didn’t have a needle and floss to stitch himself together but he’d cut off the sleeve of his shirt and wrapped it as tight as he could around his thigh and that’d be enough. It would. 

He was going to be fine.

He limped to a tree and leaned against it. He was going to have to find somewhere to hole up, though. Bleeding from a busted leg in Purgatory was… not ideal. The smell of blood and the sound of his racing heart and labored breathing would draw them in like moths to a flame. Even the ones who’d seen his face before and learned caution would probably be willing to take a shot at him now.

There’d been a rocky outcropping he’d seen through the trees a while back. Maybe there was a cave or something. If he could get protection on even just two sides, that would surely be enough. He’d been in worse jams and made it through with less. He’d just have to do it again.   
He shifted some of his weight onto the mauled leg, then let his breath hiss out between his teeth as he stepped away from the tree. He’d get to the next big tree and then he could take a rest. The outcropping was downhill and as soon as he saw a good branch on the ground he’d have a crutch, and then it’d be easy. A walk in the park.

  
  
It was not a walk in the park. But it was okay, he’d done it, he’d gotten to the rocks without running into any monsters and now he could give his leg a break. His position wasn’t quite as secure as he’d hoped it might be, true, but the shallow cleft in the rock gave him some cover on his sides as well as his back. And yeah, it faced out towards pretty much the only easy-looking path up the hillside, so anyone moving up this ridge would pass within 100 yards of him, but… but he’d manage. He’d be fine.

  
  
He had time to get to his feet, luckily, before it was on him. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t graceful, but he was standing with a silver blade in hand when the werewolf rushed him. He got in a good slash across one of the werewolf’s arms and his chest as soon as he was close enough, but the motion almost pulled him off balance. The werewolf flinched back, but hunger and the sound of a pounding heart drove him forward, and he lunged at Dean and slammed him back against the rock face. One hand pawed at Dean’s chest, claws ripping through fabric and scratching skin. Dean grabbed at the werewolf’s shoulder and wrenched him forward, desperately slamming the knife into his back before he could bite. The werewolf slumped, and Dean let the body lean against him for a moment while he panted. He’d done it, he’d survived.

He wasn’t going to be able to move the body, not with his leg the way it was.

Okay. Okay, he would deal with that the best he could. He was only going to be here for a couple days, anyway, and then he’d be able to move on. Dean slid the knife free and pushed the werewolf away from him as hard as he could. The body fell with a thump. 

Maybe it would deter anyone else.

  
  
A day and a half of sitting there like a fish in a barrel and he was still alive (or still whatever it is when you’re in Purgatory). That wasn’t bad. Granted, no one else had come by since the werewolf, and he wasn’t really sure what would happen if they did. He felt a little light-headed, just a bit, and the ripped off sleeve around his leg was soaked in blood. But if it really wasn’t clotting up he’d be dead, so there was that. 

He was sitting, staring at his leg and wondering if he should peel the bandage back and take a look or if risking more blood loss was worse than the chance of a runaway infection, when he heard noises. There were footfalls, coming up the hill, and the sound of brush being pushed out of the way. So, several of them, and confident enough to not be running on stealth mode. Unless they went past without seeing him, or had better things to do, this was it.

Dean tried to slow his breathing and settle his heart rate. Given the smell of blood lingering in the air it wasn’t much use, but he wasn’t going to slack off now. Especially when the finish line looked so close anyway. Might as well go out fighting to the end. 

The first one came into sight, still mostly obscured by the trees and bushes. Dean’s heart felt like it skipped a couple beats. He was on a life raft and there was a smudge at the horizon; he was stranded in the desert and the shimmer of water was in the distance. Oasis or just a mirage, did it matter? He was going for it. 

"Hey," he said, his voice dry and cracking. "Hey," he tried again, stronger now. The first figure stopped, and the one who’d followed him out into view paused too. 

"Over here," Dean called. He saw them turn, and the first one point. Three more gathered up behind the first two, and they all looked across at him, and there were date palms waving overhead and the smell of fresh water on the breeze.

Dean saw them recognize him, and three immediately started running towards him while the other two trotted after more cautiously, probably to keep an eye out for any approaching trouble. 

The first one to reach him crouched down next to him. 

"Is it just your leg?" he said, looking him up and down. 

"Couple scratches from him," Dean jerked his chin at the werewolf, "but the leg’s the only problem." 

"There anyone else we should look for?"

"No, I was by myself," Dean answered, then bit back a groan when the second to arrive touched the bandage. He closed his eyes and swallowed, and when he opened them again all five were there, clustered around him. 

"You’re not looking so good," one commented.  

"Yeah, well, you mind helping yourself out anyway, Handsome?" Dean asked. 

"Like we’d be hanging around together if we did," one of the other Deans scoffed. "We got to get you someplace a little more private, then we can take a look at the mess you’ve got under here." He tapped the bandage, but gently, away from the soaked-through blood. 

"Great." Dean felt almost numb with relief. He really might be okay. "How do you want to do this? ‘Cause I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m walking anywhere today." 

"One of us for each arm, two more for your legs if we have to," suggested one of the Deans. "That leaves one for going ahead and finding us somewhere nice.’

  
  
They got about six feet from the rock before Dean started to sag and the two holding him under the arms had to stop and clutch at him to keep him from falling. When another two grabbed his legs to lift him up, he thought he might cry out, despite the danger of drawing more predators. It felt like someone had heated up a metal rod and shoved it up inside his thigh. When they began to walk with him, he felt himself start to pass out.

  
  
He woke up because something was  _hurting_  him. He was down and something was on top of him and it was doing something horrifically painful to his leg and he couldn’t get up. He tried anyway.

"Woah, woah, woah! Hold on, we gotta—"

"I  _said_  he was waking up!”

There were voices trying to say something to him, voices that maybe he knew. There was still a searing pain in his leg, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been a moment ago. He struggled for breath and a handle on the situation. 

There were two people— _oh, two of the others, the ones who’d been there in the white warehouse too and then killed that smug angel and found the portal to Purgatory_ — two people kneeling on his arms, and what felt like two more pinning his ankles. They were keeping him down. The one on his left arm was trying to get Dean to look at him. He kept putting his hand on his cheek to turn his head. Dean tried to listen to what he was saying.

"— really sucks, I know, but we have to do this, we have to or you’ll keep bleeding, okay? Just a little more, alright? I know it hurts, but you can do this, you can do this and then you’ll be okay and it’ll heal up—" The other Dean paused when he saw that Dean was focusing on him. 

"You hear me?" he asked. 

Dean gave a tiny nod, the muscles in his neck tensed tight from the pain. 

"Good. Good, that’s— that’s good." The other took a deep breath. "We have to cauterize the wound, did you hear that part? It started bleeding when we took the rag off, and we have to get it to stop, okay? Otherwise you’ll lose too much blood." He grinned and patted Dean’s cheek. 

"We’re nearly done," he continued in an encouraging tone. "We just have to do a little more and then you’ll be fine. You’ll have a pretty awesome scar, huh?"

Dean didn’t believe there was only a little more left. He thought he probably woke up the first time they put hot steel to flesh. But he nodded again, because what else was there to do?

He craned his head up to look at his leg. He couldn’t see the wound itself, but the fifth Dean was kneeling next to it and looking back at him. He held up a small knife and gave it a little wave.

"You can’t die now, we’ve already ruined this for you," he said, with a smile that was half teasing and half apologetic. 

Dean could see a dull red glow on the knife blade. The temper would be shot to hell after this. 

He let his head fall back. He closed his eyes and nodded again. 

The hot blade was pressed firmly back into the wound, and the darkness behind Dean’s eyelids flared into starbursts of white. 

  
  
By the time it really was almost over, Dean was shaking. Every muscle was pulled as taut as it would go, and the ache of that hummed quietly like white noise under the screaming pain of the cauterization. 

"Alright, last one," said the Dean with the knife, and another surge of pain immediately exploded through him. This time when it subsided the weight eased off his ankles, then his arms. One of the Deans put a hand on his chest and gently kept him down when he tried to sit up.

"Hang on Tiger, give it a minute."

Dean wound up giving it several minutes, while one Dean stayed next to him and the others did something that consisted of soft talking and a shuffling, scuffling noise. The sound got closer and Dean felt a wave of warmth roll over him. He turned his head towards it and saw embers, orange-hot and heaped into long line next to him. One of the Deans nudging hot coals into the pile with a branch saw him watching and smiled, sparks dancing up in front of his face.

"We had to make a pretty big fire to get the knife hot enough," he explained, "and it’s going to be cold tonight, so no reason to let it go to waste. Especially since we uh— we also had to take your pants off." He gave a cheesy wink. "You probably don’t want to try putting them back on just yet, ‘cause that slice you’ve got is going to be pretty tender for a while," he added more seriously. "And you still have your underwear, not that we don’t know what’s under it anyway."

Dean tried to look down at himself again. This time he could see someone’s coat draped over his legs. 

"Oh," he said, not feeling up to saying anything else. 

"So, you been out here on your own?" the one sitting next to him asked. 

"Yeah." Dean made a little more of an effort. "You?" He gave a little flop of his hand towards the other Deans.

"It’s been the five of us," the one next to him answered. "Since the beginning, really. Came to lying right next to each other, stuck together through the Heaven stuff." He shrugged. "Decided to come to Purgatory together."

"You have serial numbers or something? What should I call  _you_ -you?”

"Heh. We’re uh— we’re pretty  _in sync,_ I guess, so we haven’t really been bothering with keeping track of who’s who. We’re all just  _us_ , if you know what I mean.”

He shifted, and his tone got more philosophical. “I guess we kind of started out on the same page— not like some of the others, remember how there’d be like one who didn’t give a shit standing two feet from one who was flipping out right at the same time? That was weird, man. But we weren’t like that. We all reacted to it pretty much the same, and then we’ve all been together ever since…” He looked over at the nearest Dean standing by the fire and smiled. “So we’ve been living the same life, basically. Seeing all the same things, doing all the same stuff. Anything that’s different, like one of us does something alone and something interesting happens, well, we got a lot of quiet time to talk in, here. So that kind of evens everything out.”

Dean thought about that. About having other people always there, but they’re you, so it would almost be like being alone. Some hybrid between solitude and company. Thinking about it was strangely lonely.

He’d run into other Deans after they all split off, but he’d always kept going after a day or two. He’d felt this urge to be alone, to only have himself to watch out for, and he’d shied away from any longer contact. He’d been looking out for so many people for so long, and he’d seen this as his chance to leave everything, no harm, no foul.

So he’d taken it. He’d wandered through Heaven alone, and then when he heard a portal had been found he’d jumped through without a backwards glance. 

And he loved it, he did. Being alone meant climbing up a mountain just because he wanted to, and then ditching it half-way up when he got cold and it wasn’t fun anymore. It meant spending two weeks in a hot spring and pretending the world ended with his line of sight. Being alone was never being guilty for dragging someone into danger, or for not giving them enough. It was being responsible for just himself. 

He didn’t want to be with other people, to have to go back to that. But he hadn’t thought there was any middle ground, that being alone and being together could blur into each other. 

"So you can just call us all Dean," the other Dean finished. "No need to make it complicated over something we don’t even care about." 

  
  
In the morning, Dean tried to sit up. One of the others grabbed his shoulder and pushed him back before he got all the way up. 

"If you split that scab open, we might have to help it seal back up again," he said, and gave a meaningful nod at the fire. "Take it easy and let it heal. Unless there’s somewhere you need to be, we got time."

Dean lay there, frustrated and antsy. “We’ve been here a day and a night already, with a big fire burning the whole time, and I was tracking blood all over this area a good while before that. How long before we have trouble on the doorstep?” He wanted to be moving as soon as he could. He felt exposed, vulnerable.

"What, you don’t think we can handle it?" He patted Dean’s shoulder. "We got this. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it."

None of Dean’s irritation eased, but he forced himself to lie still. Reopening his wound would only make things worse, it was true, and since he was living off of the Deans’ help, he couldn’t really argue with it being their show to run. Now that he wasn’t feeling an inch away from dying, though, being so completely unable to protect himself was itching at him.

But he made it through the whole day, lying there like a sitting duck and doing nothing while next to him the fire was fed and tended and at least one person kept watch on the woods around them. The achiness in his muscles subsided and the throbbing in his head from all the blood loss started to ebb away, but the burn in his leg persisted. 

Dean wished that would recede quicker too, but he was starting to feel a little more optimistic about life in general by the time evening settled in. 

  
  


After the second day the Deans started wandering off from camp for brief spells, leaving in twos and threes. Getting firewood, patrolling the area, doing whatever it was that made them come back looking relaxed and rumpled. There didn’t seem to be any real pattern of who went with who or when, so Dean finally gave up on privately trying to distinguish between them. There was always at least one person left at camp, with him, keeping a watch over everything.

Days went by and Dean found out what they had meant, about filling up the all the quiet time with the kind of minor details and thoughts that normally seem too trivial to say out loud. He caught himself joining in, spilling more and more of his guts the longer he heard them talking to each other, talking to him. But it didn’t really matter, did it? They  _were_  all the same person, sort of, so keeping things private wasn’t really that big a deal. It wasn’t like he had to keep the image up around  _them,_  they already knew the big secrets.

On the day he was able to sit up for more than a couple minutes at a time, one pair brought him back two sturdy branches, each cut so a fork made a short V at one end. They told him that since he was looking for something to do, he could trim them to length and carve out the V’s into U’s, and he’d have a set of crutches.

The crutches were finished before he could use them, and in exasperation one Dean resorted to dropping a chunk of log down by his side. “Make a damn bowl then,” he told him, “You can brew herbal tea in it while you stay put and let that thing heal.  _Jesus Christ_ , am I glad none of us have been bedridden before.” 

Dean did feel a pang of guilt for being so dependent on them. There hadn’t been any real trouble because of him— no monster attacks on their camp, and they didn’t seem to mind the disruption to their wandering, but he knew he wasn’t the easiest patient. He wanted to push too hard, to get better faster than he was able, and he got angry and frustrated when it didn’t work. That didn’t stop him though, from plonking the rough approximation of a bowl down on the ground and asking for water, rocks for stone boiling, and  _some fucking mint leaves,_ please. 

Finally, he was allowed to take a few steps with the crutches. With someone walking backwards in front of him and someone following after, yes, but it was progress. He was upright, and he was moving, and he was going to keep going farther every time he got up. 

After he’d limped from one side of their trampled-flat clearing to the other twenty times in one morning, the Dean in front of him leaned around to look at the Dean behind and gave a one shouldered shrug.

"Sure," the Dean at his back said, "might as well try it. We’ll just stop wherever he gets tired." 

Dean straightened, perking up like a dog that’s seen a squirrel. He was ready, ready to move and sweat and feel his muscles working. 

Dean looked at him. “Don’t get excited, Champ. We’ll start tomorrow. And if you want to be able to cover any ground, you’re going to need a whole lotta rest today. Otherwise all we’ll be doing is setting up camp fifty yards from here.”

He forced back his impatience. Of course it was only smart to wait and have a full day of travel time. And burning himself out now, when he knew he only had one more day to wait, would be foolish. 

"Okay. Okay, fine," he said, and carefully started pivoting on his crutches. "Which way are we going to go? Have you picked a direction?" He could focus on that, at least, looking ahead and the anticipation of tomorrow. 

"West looks clearest," the one behind him said, placing one hand on his back and then holding out the other toward Dean’s crutch. Dean decided to be easy for him. He balanced on his good leg and passed the crutch to him, then wrapped his arm around his shoulders and let him take some of his weight. "Less brush to trip you up."

"Let me get this side too," said the other Dean, putting his hand loosely around the remaining crutch and then sliding his shoulder under Dean’s arm when he let go. Between the two of them, Dean didn’t have to put any weight on his bad leg while they walked him back to the fire. 

Dean fidgeted the rest of the day. He dug the dirt out from under his nails with a knife point. He flicked twigs and tiny hemlock cones into the fire. He asked, in detail, about the terrain to the west. They threatened to tie him up and gag him. 

He could tell though, that they were excited too. Not to the level he was, of course, they had been able to roam beyond the small clearing of the campsite at will after all, but they were pleased by such a clear sign of recovery. They kept making baby’s first walk jokes, and ruffling his hair or slapping his shoulder when they were close to him. When they settled around the fire that night there was almost a giddiness in the air. 

  
  
Walking hurt. His good leg ached, his bad leg was building up a fierce burn, his armpits were chafing on the crutches, and his arms and wrists were sore from bearing so much of his weight. Every time a bug buzzed at his face he had to stop and lean a crutch against himself to be able to swat at it. And his pants, his pants were too tight across the bandage on his thigh and when he wasn’t careful and swung his leg forward too far they would bind against his wound and  _hurt like a motherfucker_. If he didn’t know his calves would be torn to shreds by walking through the underbrush pantsless, he’d stop and insist on taking them off. Just getting the damn things on in the morning had been a pain. He’d been in his boxers since the cauterization, to make it easier to check on his wound and to keep from putting pressure on it (and honestly, if he was stuck lying and sitting around all day, doing it in his underwear was at least more comfortable), so easing his pants up over the bandage had been a new and unpleasant experience. 

But he couldn’t complain about any of it. They kept glancing over at him, looking for any sign that they needed to call a halt and he wasn’t going to give them one for as long as he could help it. That was why he’d forced himself to set a gentle pace, because he just knew that if he broke too much of a sweat or started panting it’d be trip canceled, all flights grounded. 

So he took baby steps, and tried to keep up conversation, and made it to dusk without anyone calling it an early night. 

  
  
They made a much smaller fire that evening, and lay closer together to stay warm. In the morning Dean was stiff but did a good job of hiding it, or a good enough job anyway, because he talked them into carrying on without taking a day to rest. 

His arms ached worse, but his good leg had readjusted to walking all day, so that was a wash. He’d been hoping for an improvement over the previous day, but by midmorning he was forced to accept that that was too ambitious. He’d have to settle for the same slow rate, and hope he was allowed another full day of it. 

Near midday the Dean nearest him called a halt. He waited until Dean propped himself up against a tree. 

"You’ve been doing good and I know you don’t want to hear this, so I think we should give you a choice," he started. 

Dean  _had_  been doing good. He’d held in the winces when he misstepped and his pants pulled tight across the gash, and was pretty sure he’d only stretched out his cramping hands when none of them had seen. 

"So, you can either stop here for today, and keep going tomorrow, or you can go until it starts getting dark and then spend tomorrow lying down."

Dean picked finishing out the day. He might be able to weasel his way into different terms before his side of the bargain came due. 

  
  
Unfortunately, the other Deans were as good as he was at digging in their heels, and he agreed to stick to the original deal once they got to the point of threatening— with utter sincerity— to pry the crutches out of his hands and shove them up his ass if he didn’t shut up and lie down. 

So he shut up and lay down. He lay there on his back while two of the others slipped into the trees and scouted out tomorrow’s path, and he lay there while two of the remaining Deans combed the ground for firewood. He lay there while the fifth Dean, the one standing guard, sat down next to him and told him to stop sulking. 

“ _You_  stop sulking,” he muttered back, which only made Dean laugh at him. 

"Poor baby," Dean said with mock sympathy.

He glared up at the sky, fluffy white clouds and irritatingly lovely blue showing through the tree branches. It was a beautiful day in Purgatory. 

Dean sighed, and said, “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.” He grabbed a fistful of Dean’s hair and tugged at it until he could scooch his crossed legs under Dean’s head. He let go of Dean’s hair and petted it back into place.

Reluctantly, Dean started to relax. 

"It’s not forever," Dean said, idly brushing his hair the wrong way and then finger-combing it flat. "And even if it was, we’d make one of those chairs on poles to haul your ass around in. The kind evil queens get carried around on by their oiled-up slave dudes."

Dean snorted. It was making him feel a little better though. He closed his eyes and said, “Thanks for saving me. It’s been— it’s been pretty nice of you.”

"Yeah, well," Dean said, "It’s been our pleasure."

"You liar."

"Only a little bit. Only ‘cause you’re a whiney, pissy, jack-ass of a patient."

"Yeah, I know."

The other Deans returned with the wood, and started laying it out by the fire to drive out the damp. 

Dean let the quiet moment stretch, and then said, “We’re not the Borg, you know.”

Dean squinted up at him.

"Just ‘cause we’re all really similar doesn’t mean we—" He hesitated. "You wouldn’t have to get assimilated, is what I mean. If you wanted— If you were willing to stay. After your leg’s better and you don’t need us." 

His hands had stopped playing with Dean’s hair, and were resting on his scalp like he was afraid he’d pushed too far. 

Being alone was freedom. Alone was not having to worry about someone else: someone else’s problems, someone else’s desires, someone else’s expectations. Alone was not being tied up, chained down, locked in. Alone was escape. Alone was… was sitting against a rock bleeding out in the cold and silence. 

He hadn’t, actually, felt trapped by them. By his injury, sure, but not by _them_. They’d helped him, they’d taken care of him and supported him, they’d… made him happier. 

"It might not," Dean said slowly, cautiously, feeling it out as he went, "be  _that_ terrible, even if I did get assimilated.”

Dean’s fingers curled in his hair.

"I mean, we did spend— what? Over seventy years if you count Hell-time— being the exact same person, so. We’re already pretty similar, really, and it’s— it’s working for me. Being like this. So if I did— if I did get lost in the herd, or whatever. It probably wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

"Plus I’d look hot with a laser eye," he added, after a tiny pause. 

Dean laughed, leaning over Dean’s head so Dean could see his wide, open smile. It was nice. Dean liked it better than looking at the sky. 

"I did only agree to lying down," he said, deciding that if he couldn’t make a move physically, he could at least make one metaphorically. "Not to—" he raised his eyebrows, "—not exerting myself."

One of the Deans by the fire flicked a flake of bark at his chest. “Good effort, Romeo. Try it again this evening and  _maybe_  we’ll take pity on you.” He sounded pleased though, flattered and a little flirtatious. “Or maybe we’ll just keep ourselves entertained while you rest.”

  
  
Dean was okay. Dean was definitely okay. 

 

 


End file.
